Deregulation in power industry has made the reactive power ancillary service management a critical task to power system operators from both technical and economic perspectives. Reactive power management in power systems is a complex combinatorial optimization problem involving nonlinear functions with multiple local minima and nonlinear constraints. This paper proposes a practical market-based reactive power ancillary service management scheme to tackle the challenge. In this paper a new model for voltage security and reactive power management is presented. The proposed model minimizes reactive support cost as an economic aspect and insures the voltage security as a technical constraint. For modeling validation study, two optimization algorithm, a genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) method are used to solve the problem of optimum allocation of reactive power in power systems under open market environment and the results are compared. As a case study, the IEEE-30 bus power system is used. Results show that the algorithm is well competent for optimal allocation of reactive power under practical constraints and price based conditions.

Li Gengyin, Zhou Ming, Yang Juan, and Sun Liying, 'Research on Procurement Strategy of Reactive Power as Auxiliary Service in Power Markets,' IEEE International Conference on Electric Utility Deregulation, Restructuring and Power Technologies (DRPT2004), pp. 349-354, April 2004